About Us

Altura Ventures wants to be your partner - not your vendor.

Altura Ventures' proprietary Transition Advisory Group (TAG) approach to helping the entrepreneur is quite different from the arms-length services offered by the typical consultant, strategic advisor, investment banker, business broker or venture capitalist. The single biggest difference is that we don't demand any upfront fee for our services. The reason for this no-risk engagement for the entrepreneur business model is that we didn't like being someone else's profit center when we were just getting our businesses started and we don't think you need another mouth to feed when you are in the midst of a major business transition.

Instead, we are interested in truly partnering with the entrepreneur by creating enough added value such that our co-ownership stake increases in value right along with yours. In this way, we only make money when you achieve your business goals. We also don't accept work from every entrepreneur that comes along because we have to make sure that we believe you really can make it and make it bigger with our assistance than without it.

Your TAG Team will include:

1. Entrepreneurs (just like you) - because we believe that you should benefit from the expensive lessons from our past failures and that only another entrepreneur can truly understand the challenges you face when a plan isn't working, perils seem to loom around every corner and payroll can hardly be met.
2. Experienced software developers, user experience professionals and web designers - because just about every business can grow faster by properly leveraging the Internet and better integrating the appropriate software solutions.
3. Expert advisors in Business Law, Intellectual Property Law (including both copyrights and patents) and Tax Law - because every business is worth more if it properly protects what it owns and creatively keeps more of what it earns.

History of Altura

We founded the company in March 2006, but in a very real sense the company started in January 1980 when our founder Lee Lorenzen quit the Air Force Academy (in essence, the family business) and started his first company - Independent Programming Teams. We've been at the entrepreneurial game ever since and have learned to love the process.

Lee has been fortunate enough to meet and work with great people over the past 26 years and to recruit several of these A+ players together in Altura Ventures. These include his co-founders: Tom Mallett (his long-time personal, business and tax attorney who has helped Lee create over 20 companies, contributed key ideas to countless contracts, and managed Lee's personal tax and estate planning) and Matt Lorenzen (his oldest son who has worked in a number of these companies). Likewise, Altura Venture's first four employees are also veterans of Lee's prior start-ups: John Grant (Digital Research, Ventura Software, Altura Software, SHOP.COM), Jennifer Olson (Altura Software, CatalogCity.com and SHOP.COM), Stephan Schwirzke (Post Digital and SHOP.COM) and Stefan van der Bijl (Altura Software and CatalogCity.com).

In addition to our TAG Team services, we have a few entrepreneurial ventures of our own to keep us busy. These new businesses help keep our skills sharp and ensure that we are constantly taking our own medicine, measuring its effectiveness and adding new success ingredients to it.